It’s been so long I can’t recall when I last saw your face
But I know that for it to have been the last it was neither time nor place
As your features fade to me and I lose the depths of your brown eyes
A little piece inside my heart tears itself and then it cries.

So long were we apart and yet a part of me you’d remained
Too interwoven now my soul to simply be retrained
To lose as well the friendship from the one I held so dear
Seems the thousandth cut to kill me when not a word I hear

Is it here the story endeth now with fizzle where once was flame
Is it to be in fairy tales where I can solely speak your name
Will time perhaps afford that some love be requited
Albeit knowing from experience that what was once is not ignited

I’d sooner travel with you near me, if no longer at my side
I know without your sense around me I can scarcely take a stride
Perhaps I offer little to entice you as a worthy friend
But I had to let you know that I hope this will not be the end

Clichées are very often that because they are true for so many people in a variety of circumstances. Or perhaps they are clichées because people say them so frequently whether they are true or not in order to say something when they cannot think of anything original, prefering instead to fall back on a hackneyed phrase or mantra that smacks of empathy without really ever putting themselves out on a limb. No area is more cliché-ridden than that of love.

Most of us have been at the sharp end of the ‘L word’ more than once and to have been so requires us to have first experienced the very reason that makes us take the risk. The alternative is the life of the comfortably numb. Is it therefore a panacea that we seek to give the person newly joining the brother- or sisterhood of the lachrymose succour or is it in fact ourselves we wish to reassure that such things have ultimately a karmic balance that will result in the end all our dreams coming true and all our fears being quashed? If by every emotional catastrophe of others we allow our own belief to be dented then from where can we draw our hope?

You may feel life has meaning and if so this may bring you a sense of order, of balance or at least of some reason. You may feel that fate has its plans, that there is a reason for everything and a path we are all destined to walk down. If, like me, you do not hold with any of those tenets then you have to look upon such events in life as being ones that do not resolve themselves and that we as humans are in fact naive to believe they will, not to mention rather self-indulgent in even thinking they should.

Time does not heal it merely clots the wound, allows a scab to form and eventually, after perhaps some picking at it or the metaphorical application of salt by life events and/or people, to be left with a scar that no longer causes physical pain but reminds us of a time when we once felt it and the reasons we were wounded in the first place. If we are lucky it is scarred in a place that is not so often visible, if we are not then perhaps we will forever wince when something strays near the area, transporting us back to the spectre of what had caused us the pain the first time or maybe just the last time. Do we stop undertaking the activity that caused it in the first place? That rather depends on how much we enjoyed it, or what enticement there may be to do so again, but we will never be the same innocent participant as we were before, we will have protective clothing and be watching for the blade that cut us.

I am wounded and the blood is yet to clot, the pain is duller now as my brain has become more used to its ache and it has sought to release some endorphins to help me to function at all. I do not need platitudes I need morphine derivatives, anything else just seems either callous or patronising and neither of those are any more helpful than vacuous clichées!

Oh can there be more parlous sight
than a boy who can’t survive the night
a sorry figure who feels the sting
of a lowly, upturned Claddagh ring
not long since on finger proudly sat
what more sad a sign could be than that
staring down as enforced grieving
sees every little promise leaving
with it ebbs all sense of vigour
that cuts a broken listless figure
can there really be one more of sorrow
than knowing it’s the same tomorrow

memories through so much survived cannot the same way be revived
a soul that’s wounded, torn in twain will never heal to quite the same
a seam, a stich e’er out of place, occasional look on empty face
the hope, the dream’s cruel fall from grace, a heart’s faith all unseated

the fabric of constructed real that circumstance saw fit to steal
what once had seemed so set in stone recedes to lifetime spent alone
reluctant path henceforth to walk no capability left to talk
the nighttime shadows furtive stalk ’til very end of days

one day perhaps the torture halt and reconcile my line of fault
I’ll come at last at least accept within the world a slight connect
hardened towards fair innocence may be a fitful recompense
relinquishing the muscles tense though there will never be true peace